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Welcome to Physics & Astronomy

The Physics & Astronomy Department, situated at the heart of North America’s Quantum Valley, Canada’s technology hub, is located an hour south-west of Toronto. Waterloo is like no other place in the world to study physics. Come to Waterloo to study quantum information, holographic landscapes, and supermassive black holes. Create exotic materials, study laser optics, and build bio-sensors. The Physics & Astronomy department is your link to the Institute of Quantum Computing and the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics.

In 2012, a group of University of Toronto researchers led by Geoffrey Hinton sparked a revolution in artificial intelligence that has dramatically changed the world. Their breakthrough came after decades of research designing machine learning algorithms for use in computer vision tasks, such as feature extraction from raw image data.

Meet our people

Professor Lütkenhaus' research group explores the interface between quantum communication theory and quantum optical implementations. They translate between abstract protocols (described by qubits) and physical implementations (described for example by laser pulses); they benchmark implementations to properly characterize quantum advantage and exploit quantum mechanical structures for use in quantum communication.